Since the mid-eighteen hundreds California has been a magnet for internal migration, the destination of many following the advice of Horace Greeley to "go west, young man." No longer, as Wendell Cox looks at CA's population shifts for New Geography.
Of all the Americans who moved from any state to another during the last decade (n = 6.3 million) roughly a quarter left California to live somewhere else. Another quarter left New York. The other 48 states accounted for the balance of migrators.
CA still had 10% growth during that decade. The outmigrants were replaced by international immigrants, while births minus deaths accounted for the gains.
Essentially, CA lost 1.5 million residents, replaced them with (mostly) illegal immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, and grew by roughly 3.3 million births, many of those born to illegal immigrant parents. Those constitute dramatic population shifts.
Unfortunately for CA, this means many taxpayers left the state and were replaced with "tax eaters," people who consume more in government services than they pay in taxes. Clearly, this population transformation is a major cause of CA's financial problems.
Poor California.
